"A dangerous gap exists between our personal experience, which is mainly happy, and our view of a society in decline."

"Progressives want the world to be a better place. We bemoan its current inequities and oppression - yet if we fail to celebrate the progress that human beings have made, and if we sound as though the future is a fearful place, we belie our own philosophy. Instead, we need to address a deficit in social optimism that threatens the credibility of our core narrative."

"My starting point is the need to forge a new collectivism. It is in working with others on a shared project of social advance that we can be reconnected to the sense of collective agency so missing from modern political discourse."

It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that brings hope.

"The old collectivism is dead or dying. Its characteristics - hierarchical, bureaucratic, paternalistic - are no longer suited to the challenges or the mood of the times. The institutions of the new collectivism must be devolved, pluralistic, egalitarian and, most of all, self-actualising."

It is morally unjustifiable to treat sentient animals as items of chattel property.

Great Ape Project (GAP) is an international movement that aims to defend the rights of the non-human great primates - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

The main rights are: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty and the prohibition of torture.

"I am the son and heir, Of nothing in particular, You shut your mouth how can you say, I go about things the wrong way, I am human and I need to be loved,just like everybody else does..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity"Neurodiversity is an idea which asserts that atypical (neurodivergent) neurological development is a normal human difference that is to be recognized and respected as any other human variation."

11 October 2009

The first acknowledged earth born creature to leave the planet was Laika, in Sputnik 2, 1957.

More dogs followed, between 1959 and 1961.

Before the launch, one of the scientists took Laika home to play with his children. In a book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine, Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote, "I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live."

among the several “Towers” proposals, there is “Eco-Casino”... Its true innovation, if brought to fruition, is the marriage of sustainability and gambling... The roulette skyline bar, powered by wind turbines, sits beneath a bay of solar-powered slot machines by the rooftop pool, and patrons can bet on the weather.

"....the world around us is full of evolving systems with all kinds of internal structure – whether it's the networks of cells present in the human body or the social networks that occur in cyberspace."

STRAY SOD

A Stray Sod is an enchanted clump of grass.

When one steps on the clump, it triggers a magic spell and under the influence of this spell, all the familiar landmarks have disappeared. The road you walked upon is suddenly gone and no matter how hard you look, it can not be seen again.

In other cases, a traveler can suddenly notice that he is walking in a completely different direction, and no matter which way he turns, he cannot find the right direction again.